The House passed a clean debt-ceiling hike of undetermined size on Tuesday — a vote that alienated dozens of Republicans and led one conservative group to call for the removal of Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) as Speaker.

The bill was approved in a 221-201 vote, largely on the backs of Democrats. Only 28 Republicans voted for it, while 199 voted against.

Among the Republicans who voted “yes:” House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy. Noted budget wonk Paul Ryan opted to show again that he’s vastly overrated as a budget wonk by voting “no.”

Greg Sargent makes an interesting argument that this last minute cave-in by the House Tea Party cavemen may actually make it possible for John Boehner to marginalize the crazies enough that they won’t be able to use the debt ceiling as an extortion tool any more: Did Barack Obama Do John Boehner a Big Favor?

It’s worth asking whether, by holding the line until Republicans had no choice but to capitulate on the debt limit, Barack Obama actually did John Boehner a long term favor of sorts.

Most observers think John Boehner genuinely wants to get to some kind of long term budget deal. If true, he plainly has been hampered by pressure from the right not to even enter into negotiations that risk resulting in a compromise Tea Partyers would find unacceptable. Before yesterday’s outcome, conservatives explicitly were insisting that GOP leaders must not enter into any talks unless they could wield the threat of harm to the country to get something for nothing. Remember, Ted Cruz angered fellow Republicans when he refused to enter into normal budget talks unless Dems agreed in advance not to make raising the debt ceiling even tangentially related to the talks, effectively reserving it as an extortion tool later.

Cruz, of course, went on to demand that the GOP use extortion tactics to force Dems to agree to unwind Obamacare. GOP leaders tried that with a government shutdown, and then with the debt ceiling, and the rest is history.

Now that Dems have confirmed they will not give up anything to Republicans under such conditions, it’s conceivable this could end up giving Boehner a way to stave off the inevitable demands that he drag the country through the same again. He can rightly point to precedent. That won’t make conservatives any happier. But it could help mobilize GOP elites and moderates who balked at the party’s embrace of extortion tactics — and will probably be even more wary of them during the 2014 elections - to give even less ground to them next time.

My more cynical take: if GOP moderates were really going to pull the Republican Party back from the brink of total weirdness, they would have done it a long time ago. All this insanity didn’t just start last month, after all.

I’m not convinced there’s enough rationality left in the right wing hive mind to guarantee there won’t be any more episodes like this (no matter how self-destructive), or that John Boehner won’t continue to pander to the Tea Creatures, but I’ll be pleasantly surprised if either turns out to be the case.

You probably already know that House Republicans messed around all day and then couldn’t agree on anything enough to call a vote, so we’re one day closer to a default on the US debt. But did you know one of the main sticking points for the Tea Party fanatics driving this crazy train is… birth control?

Conservative House members expressed a desire Tuesday to fund the government only until Dec. 15 in order to force a fight over ObamaCare’s birth control mandate.

Members of the House GOP discussed a proposal that would reopen the government through mid-December, just weeks before a provision of the mandate takes effect on Jan. 1 for religiously affiliated groups.

Republicans seemed adrift after canceling a vote on a debt-limit plan Tuesday night.

But members of the party signaled concerns about letting the Jan. 1 date pass without waging a battle over contraception.

“It boils down to conscience protections that basically become compromised on the first of January, and that’s bothersome to a lot of people,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) told reporters Tuesday afternoon.

While Democrats refuse to negotiate on the continuing resolution and the debt limit, apparently assuming the GOP will eventually cave, House Republicans insist they are prepared to bring borrowing authority to a screeching halt.

“I can assure you it’s not posturing. It’s not a political play or anything like that,” Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., told CQ Roll Call on Tuesday.

Gingrey said Republicans were “absolutely” prepared to lose the House to extract concessions on the CR and the debt limit, and he said the White House is “missing the determination of the Republican Party.”

“I mean, they seem to think that we will miss this opportunity for a ‘Braveheart’ moment to do the right thing for the American people and that we’ll back down for fear of losing the House and not gaining control of the Senate,” Gingrey said.

Seventy percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll disapprove of how the Republicans in Congress are handling the budget negotiations, up 7 percentage points from a week ago. Far fewer, 51 percent, disapprove of Obama’s approach, essentially unchanged in the past week.

The Democrats in Congress remain between the two: Sixty-one percent disapprove of their handling of the budget breakdown, up 5 points in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates.

In another way to look at the results, Obama’s gone from 41-50 percent approve-disapprove last week to 45-51 percent now - a 9-point negative margin then, a similar 6-point negative margin today. The Democrats likewise show little change overall (from a 22- to a 26-point negative gap). But the Republicans have gone from 26-63 percent approve-disapprove to 24-70 percent, an initial 37-point difference widening now to a 46-point negative result.

The Mother Of All Piesre: #335 lawhawk [wingnut]WE SHUD ALL BE LIKE TEH WALTONS!!11 THEY ARE TEH FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE ONEZ!!11!! THEY ARE WORKING HARDER & SMARTER THEN EVERYWUN BUY OFFERING ONLY TEH BEST VALEWS FOR TEH CHEAPEST PRICE!!!! AND THEY ARE KIND AN GENEROUS ...

“Whether it’s today, or a number of weeks from now, or a number of months from now, or a number of years from now, it will always be Congress’s responsibility to raise our debt ceiling so that the United States can pay the bills that Congress has incurred,” he told reporters during his daily briefing.

“It will always be, as long as he’s president, President Obama’s position that that responsibility is not negotiable. That there’s not a game of trading for political priorities or agenda items that Republicans have not been able to achieve through legislation or the ballot box.”

A year ago, Yoho was a large-animal veterinarian in north Florida who had never held elected office. Today, he is part of one of the most influential voting blocs in the House of Representatives, the hard-line conservatives who pushed their own leadership into a risky showdown over President Obama’s health-care law.

Right now — with national parks closed and workers furloughed and cancer studies shut down — Yoho is supposed to be learning a hard lesson, about being careful what you wish for.

He is not.

Instead, Yoho has felt little pressure to change his mind, either from inside the Capitol or outside it. His leaders are still weak and uneasy. His constituents — or at least the small slice that bothers to write or call him — are mostly supportive. And his defiance has made him far more powerful than a freshman congressman has any right to expect.

So he’s already planning for a bigger act of defiance.

“You’re seeing the tremor before the tsunami here,” Yoho said. “I’m not going to raise the debt ceiling.”

[…]

“I think we need to have that moment where we realize [we’re] going broke,” Yoho said. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, that will sure as heck be a moment. “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets,” since they would be assured that the United States had moved decisively to curb its debt.

“Our problems are eminently solvable, and we know what we have to do to solve them. With respect to debt, our problem is not confidence in our credit,” he said. “The markets continue to reaffirm our credit as among the world’s safest. Our challenge is the need to tackle our deficits over the long term.”

Since then, America has made incredible progress in tackling its short-term deficit but the issues that caused the initial downgrade have only gotten worse. The problem has never been America’s finances, but rather the emergence of radical politicians willing to gamble with America’s full faith and credit, as S&P noted in a statement this week that reaffirmed their 2011 ruling.

“The current impasse over the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling creates an atmosphere of uncertainty that could affect confidence, investment, and hiring in the U.S.,” the S&P research team explained.

“This sort of political brinksmanship is the dominant reason the rating is no longer ‘AAA,’” they added. But the agency also noted that it wasn’t considering another downgrade.

Within hours of S&P’s new guidance, Tea Party congressman Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said that he didn’t believe it was even possible for the United States to default on its debt. He called such talk “false demagoguery,” which was his major at Glenn Beck University.

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote in The Daily Beast about the speech he was preparing for the president to give in the case of an actual default in 2011. He described the scenario America faced at the time like this:

Without enough cash on hand, the government would be forced to delay indefinitely Social Security checks, the ones our grandparents depend on to put food in their mouths and a roof over their heads. Veterans who served this country would stop receiving the benefits they earned, and the men and women in uniform risking their lives for us wouldn’t get paychecks.

Every company in America that does business with the federal government, of which there are hundreds of thousands, would not see their contracts paid on schedule, an effect that would ripple down to their employees and their families. With each passing day, making our debt payments to businesses and governments around the world would become more and more difficult. When the world stopped seeing the United States as a safe and reliable place to invest, the cost of borrowing money would skyrocket for every single American—whether it’s a home mortgage or a personal credit card. And those high borrowing costs, coupled with billions in delayed income for seniors, soldiers, small-business owners, and their employees, almost surely would send our economy and the world’s into a crisis even deeper and more dramatic than the Great Recession of 2009.

The rollout yesterday was not without its hiccups. Some people were met with overloaded servers so that they couldn’t complete the registration, and there were some bugs in the process.

That is to be expected with any rollout of any major software/website. It shouldn’t be a surprise given how the Republicans have sought to defund, delay, and destroy the ACA at every opportunity.

They’ve attempted to repeal the ACA more than 40 times in the House alone.

Years of litigation over the constitutionality of the law was concluded with a landmark decision that found the central provision, the individual mandate, constitutional. The GOP claimed that this was unconstitutional, even though the GOP and the Heritage Foundation had made the individual mandate a central part of their alternative plan to Hillarycare when that proposal was rolled out in the early 1990s. Republican Mitt Romney made the individual mandate part of the MassCare program.

But, the moment that the Obama Administration made it a central tenet of the ACA, the GOP savaged it as an affront to personal liberty. We’d have to have collective amnesia to follow the Republican argument and logic. We’d have to ignore that the ACA is modeled on the very successful MassCare, which has reduced the number of uninsureds in Massachusetts by expanding access to affordable health insurance.

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Frank says:

The gorilla is on an island,eats bananas and has a good time all day long. He plays out there in the bushes. Some Americans find out about the gorilla and they hear how BIG he is - you know.They're very impressed with the size of the beast. So they catch the gorilla & they stick him in a boat & bring him back to the US. They show him off to everybody & make a bunch of money. ...Then they kill him ! -- The song King Kong.1968 tour Wisconsin.